These Mini-Ships Teach Pilots How to Navigate Major Waterways

December 7, 2015 - They look like toy boats, but they serve a serious purpose. An outsider at this facility near Grenoble, France, may see grown men riding arounda lake in miniature ships. But these are pilots of the world's largest ships, and they're practicing navigation with meticulously engineered 1:25 scale models of real cruisers, tankers, and containerships. Port Revel Shiphandling Training Centre, in operation since 1967, has had more than 6,000 maritime pilots and merchant ship officers from all over the world train on its 13-acre man-made lake. Wind-, wave-, and current-generating machines simulate real-world conditions, to help the pilots learn how to maneuver in shallow waters and deal with emergencies—in safe conditions. The school recently added its own built-to-scale course of the giant new locks that will open next year to allow the passage of large ships through the Panama Canal. The Panama Canal Pilots Association has made its own training lake but is sending senior pilots and simulator instructors to Port Revel to learn how to teach using manned models. Port Revel has built two large model ships and is sending them along with four radio-controlled tugboats to the Panama Canal training facility.

When you look at the ships you may think that they are small toys, but the minute you get on it, the power is to scale to the size and it becomes very real very quickly.

ARTHUR DE GRAAUWPORT ENGINEER AND DIRECTORPORT REVEL SHIP HANDLING SCHOOL

When we build a new ship the first question is "Is this ship correct? Is it close to the reality?"

The length, the width and the draft of the ship are reduced by scale of 1/25 so a 250-meter ship, which is a big ship, would be 10 meters here.

The history of this place goes back to the 50ies. And later on Esso came to us, they had a problem in changing the size of the ships, going from roughly 50,000 tons to 200,000 tons. And their captains were a bit anxious about that because they had no simulators, no computers in the sixties, so they were looking for a place where they could anticipate on this and as engineers we didn't know if that would work but we told them "ok, come and try" that was a big success so from there we started in 1967, we open the place and after that we took over.

We receive mainly pilots now, about 80% of the people coming here. We receive about 200 people per year, which is a very small school.

As a port engineer I would be ashamed of designing a port like this. It's full of difficulties and that's the aim of our training.

We have here the locks, one of them is the Panama lock, the new Panama lock, 55 meter wide, and so the ships can go around here, around this waterway.

BRAD TAIPALUSPILOT, THE BEC COAST PILOTSNANAIMO, CANADA

Port-Revel is a great place to come in. We can tweak our skills, we can do things here that we couldn't do with real live ships but we do it to scale here so it's on real-time.

We have Russians here, we have pilots from Brazil, and of course myself from Canada. So we even have over lunch and dinner we talk about different scenarios, different ships, different cruise; it's a good learning experience.

ARTHUR DE GRAAUWPORT ENGINEER AND DIRECTORPORT REVEL SHIP HANDLING SCHOOL

We try to concentrate on what is more difficult to do on a simulator so in order to be complimentary.

The difference may be found especially in what seafarers call interactions between two ships when they are at close quarters, when they meet in a canal, when they are close to a bank, and that, at this time, cannot really be computed correctly but here, everything is there so we reproduce shallow water, bank effects and currents, and also waves.

Usually when we build a new ship we try to ask the captain of the real ship to come over and to go on the lake with our model, and just do things you know. After few hours when he comes back we ask him "Is it ok?" and if he says, with some tears in the eyes "It's my ship!" then I'm happy.

These Mini-Ships Teach Pilots How to Navigate Major Waterways

December 7, 2015 - They look like toy boats, but they serve a serious purpose. An outsider at this facility near Grenoble, France, may see grown men riding arounda lake in miniature ships. But these are pilots of the world's largest ships, and they're practicing navigation with meticulously engineered 1:25 scale models of real cruisers, tankers, and containerships. Port Revel Shiphandling Training Centre, in operation since 1967, has had more than 6,000 maritime pilots and merchant ship officers from all over the world train on its 13-acre man-made lake. Wind-, wave-, and current-generating machines simulate real-world conditions, to help the pilots learn how to maneuver in shallow waters and deal with emergencies—in safe conditions. The school recently added its own built-to-scale course of the giant new locks that will open next year to allow the passage of large ships through the Panama Canal. The Panama Canal Pilots Association has made its own training lake but is sending senior pilots and simulator instructors to Port Revel to learn how to teach using manned models. Port Revel has built two large model ships and is sending them along with four radio-controlled tugboats to the Panama Canal training facility.